


Early Camaraderie

by korasami



Category: American Revolution RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: Gen, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Revolutionary War, Slice of Life, There's a really bad swear word but it's in Latin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 05:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4167213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/korasami/pseuds/korasami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In the name of extending the bounds of acquaintance, you might as well address me here on out as Alexander."</p>
<p>Colonels Hamilton and Laurens spend a lazy autumn hour together early on in their friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Early Camaraderie

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place early autumn of 1777, sometime around the Battle of Brandywine. Please excuse any historical inaccuracies (or, better yet, inform me of them!) as this was written without consulting anything other than my memory.
> 
> Also on my [Tumblr](http://www.korasami.tumblr.com/).

Quite characteristically, Hamilton sighed. He was lying on his back, stretched eagle-like directly on top of the crisp autumn grass, only a thin blanket separating him from the autumn chill drafting through the camp. The morning was too early for other men to be awake, yet Hamilton was certainly the most morning bird of a man Laurens had ever met. While not necessarily a fortunate or mutually beneficial way of working, Laurens found himself up and out of their tent at the most unholy hours ever since arriving to the Continental camp as Washington's aide.

"Laurens," Hamilton whined, and the aforementioned man rolled his eyes, "I _do_ wish we would find an alternative activity, preferably one more pleasant than our current predicament."

Having only known the man for a matter of weeks, Laurens wasn't entirely sure how to deal with the constant moods his new friend seemed to be afflicted with. Still, he had learned a few tricks to keep the melodrama at bay, however temporary they might be. "Pu- _lease_ , Hamilton," Laurens laughed, emphasizing the first word in a manner that would bring pride to his teenaged self, "don't act so haughty. You sound like my father with that tight language of yours, and he's an aristocrat. We're comrades. Loosen up. Your pre-written drivel won't get you very far with me or anyone else."

Hamilton propped himself on his elbows, still reclining back, and scoffed. "Pre-written?"

"Yes, pre-written. Rehearsed, scripted, what have you. Don't you try and play off as if you don't come up with what you plan on saying, out loud, in your head for the most eloquent effect." Laurens paused, his grin widening. "There, you've found your _alternative activity_. Mentally setting up entire conversations between us for the next few weeks! Won't that be fun, Colonel?"

"Fun, Colonel?" Hamilton parroted mockingly. He sat up abruptly, his blanket pooling loosely around his hips, his face and body slipping gracefully into a distinctly determined demeanor. An air of challenge suddenly swamped the oxygen shared between Laurens and his companion, which the former found both a surprise and a discomfort.

Laurens gulped, but he wasn't sure why he felt so clustered in the open camp environment. "I didn't mean anything by it," he said, "but I'm not entirely sure what you've taken offense to."

Almost instantly, Hamilton relaxed. "I, too, apologize, Laurens. I must admit, it's a fresh—" Hamilton stopped himself, breathing slowly, as if reassessing a situation Laurens couldn't possibly begin to comprehend. "My apologies. You're right, I do have a tendency to think before I speak, unlike present company—" Laurens opened his mouth to object, but thought the better of it when seeing the telltale glint of humor flicker through Hamilton's eyes and smile, "—but I ought to fix that if I'm going to be in the presence of common soldiers such as yourself."

Hissing, Laurens replied;

"Now, Hamilton, I'll have you know I come from a respectable line of prominent Carolinians and Frenchmen. Where does _your_ accent hail from? It's not the New York dialect that you or Washington claims it to be, that's for sure."

That got Hamilton to stop speaking, but Laurens regretted his words almost immediately. The man before Laurens lost the sparkle resident in those blue eyes and ungracefully plopped his back down on the chilled earth. "I'm not a native to New York, nor the the Colonies themselves, no," Hamilton spoke through stunted lips, "but I figure _that's_ a conversation to save until we're at least on a first name basis, _Laurens_."

Not one to miss a beat nor a possibility of friendship, Laurens slid over to rest his palms over Hamilton's knees, locking his elbows and resting his entire weight onto his new friend.

"Well, that's easy," Laurens said. He put the friendliest face on to match his tone of voice, and leaned as far forward as he could to ensure his grin would be visible by the confused Hamilton. "My name's John Laurens, but you can call me John. It's very nice to meet you. I'm under the impression we'll be working for General Washington together? Excellent. It will be great to get to know you over the next while!"

Hamilton rolled his eyes. "Oh, Laurens—John—don't expect me to open up to you that quickly. No amount of puppy-eyes can crack me, and trust that, because my older brother had the look of one half my childhood. But in the name of extending the bounds of acquaintance, you might as well address me here on out as Alexander."

Laurens laughed, and he knew he shouldn't have felt as giddy as he did. "You sound stuffier than General Washington, and he's a Virginian. If you won't indulge me in your actual roots, I might as well hazard a guess. Tell me, my dear Alexander, do you hail from French nobles or Dutch?"

Hamilton scoffed. "My blood hasn't seen nobility in _at least_ several generations, no doubt. Yours, however? I wouldn't be surprised if you hailed from King George himself."

A man of charm Hamilton certainly was, but Laurens wouldn't let him know that without several minutes of mocking. "Oh, _Alexander_ ," Laurens gushed breathily with batted eyelashes, "do you talk to all your suitors in this manner, or am I special?"

Hamilton choked. "Good God, what's that supposed to mean?" Laurens just laughed, pushing himself off of Hamilton's knees. He rolled down onto the grass, enjoying the crunch he heard as the blades gave way to his body weight. "Laurens!"

Laurens rolled so his body was just inches away from Hamilton's. "John."

"John," Hamilton repeated, an obvious tire in his voice. "John, you are completely strange."

"I know," Laurens admitted cheerily. "It's quite a good thing that our getting to know one another has been productive, eh, Lord Hamilton?" The shove he got from his friend wasn't unexpected in the slightest.

"And I suppose that would make you Lady Laurens?" Hamilton asked cheekily. Laurens frowned.

"Watch it, you," he chided. "And I'll have you know that there's already a Lady Laurens. Well, in the Eyes of God, at any rate."

"Oh?" Hamilton asked, a thin eyebrow raised. A clump of flour mixed with the dew of grass right above it detracted slightly from the desired effect, but Laurens didn't bring it up.

He shrugged as best he could with his back flat on the landscape. "It's complicated. She and I don't see eye to eye, and it was all to please our fathers, honestly—marriage ended up being a necessity more than a choice of mine, given the circumstances—"

Anything Laurens had wanted to say were halted with a sharp laugh from Hamilton. "So, you are trying to tell me, in the most roundabout of ways, that _confutuisti e matrimonium_?"

Laurens blushed the deepest red he could have thought up, which only furthered Hamilton's amusement.

"Don't worry, John, I couldn't judge you," Hamilton admitted, rolling onto his side to get a good look at his friend. "I've tasted Venus' fruits far too many times to be a decent bachelor, and then some. But my escapades are neither here nor there; I'm sure my retellings would not be suitable for ears as delicate as those belonging to a man married with wife. Yours, on the contrary, interest me greatly."

Laurens coughed, his face still beet red. "My _escapades_ interest you? What is _that_ even supposed to mean?"

The Devil within Laurens' new friend was let loose in the grin that followed. "This necessity you speak of. Does that imply there are some little Laurenses running about South Carolina which I should know about?"

Covering his face in his hands, Lauren blew out a stream of hot air. "It's England, actually—and, and yeah. A baby girl. I've never even met her, and—why am I telling you this? I hardly know you."

"Oh," Hamilton said with a wave, "I've just got one of those personalities. The sailors and traders back home never could resist this face."

"I'm sure they couldn't," Laurens admitted, although he wasn't sure why.

"Oh, John," Hamilton all but drawled, "do continue regaling me with the stories of your young daughter. It's only a natural thing for fathers to do, is it not?"

"Why the question?" Laurens deflected, "Surely your own father did the same, if not for a daughter, than for you and your brother?"

Laurens wished he could smack himself and still present himself as a decently minded fellow, for Hamilton turned away at once. An invisible iron wall erected itself between the pair almost immediately after he had spoken. After a few moments of silence which made the hairs on Laurens' neck dance like a spider, Hamilton shed light on the mood.

"My father left me—us—when I was young. While it's certainly something one can move on from, it's nothing one can ever forget nor emerge without scars."

In a split second decision to protect his new friend from the burden of Laurens' own mistakes, Laurens kept quiet on the matter. Perhaps letting Hamilton carry on in his assumption that Laurens had only left his family because of war, and that he had the full intention of returning to them once his ticket was up, was the best short term solution to an apparently life-haunting trauma—one that Laurens was not particularly eager to inflict upon his infant child now that he had begun to see even the barest cracks of its effects first hand.

"I—I'm sorry to hear that," Laurens said instead.

Hamilton humphed. "I suppose you've got one of those personalities too, then."

Silence settled between them for just a brief moment, but the quiet was long enough that Laurens found himself breathing with the wind. "I suppose so," he said at last.

Without really trying to, Laurens realized that something had shifted in the young relationship between them. Perhaps it was merely the leap between new acquaintances and tentative friends, but Laurens wasn't too sure it was all so superficial. He let his eyes roll lazily onto Hamilton's face, and wasn't nearly as surprised as he ought to have been to learn Hamilton was doing some observation of his own.

The two lay there in the relative quiet of mid-afternoon, only their joint breathing giving the world an indication of their presence. Laurens slowly took in his new friend's appearance; the darkness of his cheekbones and the shadows his thick eyelashes cast upon them seemed out of place against the pale green grass beneath him which the cherry halo of chestnut locks curled loosely against. Laurens adjusted his position to relatively match Hamilton's, only resting his head in the crook of his elbow rather than propping it, and was surprised to notice, for the first time, a splash of low-contrast freckles littering the well-defined nose between those mesmerizing blue eyes.

And blue they were! If asked to describe them, Laurens knew with all honesty that he would draw a blank. Not because they were unmemorable—not in the slightest—but because no single descriptor could possibly capture the magnificent azure contained within the glassy gaze before him. To Laurens it seemed as if all of the heavens had been reared down to decorate himself with the highest honor; even gazing directly into Hamilton's eyes, Laurens knew there were entire galaxies behind them that he was not privy to seeing.

Laurens wanted to be privy to them. He found himself longing to know Hamilton as beyond the bounds of war induced camaraderie (albeit strengthened by a mutual desire for common grounds) and this feeling took him more my surprise than anything else in his twenty-odd short years of living. How could this delicate man, several years his junior, shake the grounds of everything Laurens knew and believed firmly in in a matter of minutes? Why should it be possible that Laurens wished for this someone so out of place in a war zone to be the one thing that anchors him to reality? Laurens frowned at the unwilling thoughts swimming through his mind, and at that, so did Hamilton.

"What's the matter?" Hamilton asked this all too worriedly for someone whom he had only just made his companionship, but Laurens wouldn't dream of complaining. Laurens was pulled from his reverie by the concerned nature in his friend's voice, all too aware that his unconscious action was the cause of those graceful features crumpled into a display of displeasure. Laurens shook his head, both to rid his mind of his intruding thoughts and to quell any fear Hamilton might have; of course, Laurens chided himself, he was probably over reading the situation entirely.

"Sorry," Laurens said, surprised to find his voice a dry croak. He swallowed, then cleared his throat. "I was just lost in thought."

"You certainly look lost," Hamilton admitted, chuckling at a joke that Laurens didn't understand. "Well, I suppose our friend Lafayette is probably worried sick over our whereabouts," Hamilton sat up, stretched, and began to stand up. "I'll bet he's running 'round the camp, yelling in his native French, setting to get Washington to send out a search party. Poor General! The way the Marquis follows him around, it's a wonder he isn't fluent in the language." Laurens could tell Hamilton was about to go off on one of his tangents, so he interrupted with a grin.

"We'll just have to chalk it up to 'want of a lazy afternoon', eh?" he asked, cracking his stiff neck and rolling his shoulders. "I'm sure the good fellows are too busy with each other to have begun to miss us anyhow."

Hamilton laughed, and Laurens decided he had never heard anything more jolly. "And what is _that_ supposed to mean, John?"

Laurens shrugged politely, propped up back on his elbows. "Nothing, of course. Simply commenting on Lafayette's more _European_ leanings, if you catch my drift."

"Oh, it's been caught and understood," Hamilton said, lending an arm to help pull Laurens up from the ground, and Laurens was taken aback at the deepness of his voice. "You'll find that my _leanings_ are much more _French_ than perhaps our dear Marquis himself." With those words having been said, Hamilton swiftly pulled Laurens to his feet and _giggled_. Laurens froze where he stood, watching Hamilton's silhouette saunter it's way back towards the camp. Something about his retreating gait seemed to taunt Laurens' very essence, and he knew in an instant that being friends with Alexander Hamilton would prove itself to be a bigger challenge than winning the war for independence itself.

And if he was being completely honest with himself, Laurens knew that he wouldn't have taken it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't ask for a translation of the Latin Hamilton spoke, it really is rather naughty.
> 
>  
> 
> ~~It translates, literally, to "you have fucked vigorously out of marriage".~~


End file.
